> images more faithfully than JPEG. Neither GIF nor PNG, though, is both
> smaller and better than JPEG for large screen shots of computer desktops,
The sort of screen shots I'm thinking of are of application windows.
There is a problem with the latest generation, that the only efficient
graphices format would WMF or SVG, but there are still a lot of NT 4/
Window 98 generation applications around and these tend to produce
much smaller GIFs than JPEGs, with the advantage that the text is sharp.
Anything with a significant wallpaper content will not compress well
with GIF or PNG, but will also need a very conservative JPEG compression,
to minimise distortion of the, often very small, text. XP's own screens
tend to break even between compromise compression JPEG and GIF; the
tradeoff is between banding in colour gradients and distorted fine
detail and text.